Asia Pacific is one of – if not the most – enterprising and trade-centric places in the world. There are over 200 million companies in Asia to match its huge population, while Asia Pacific is the largest exporting region with 70 of the world’s top 80 trade corridors¹ touching a market in the region.
Beyond the sheer scale of the consumer economy, business-to-business (B2B) payments are the lifeblood of commerce here. From trade invoices to supplier payments to payouts to creators in the thriving digital economy, these flows make the economy tick.
The good news is that B2B payments are digitising fast. The volume of digital B2B payments in Asia Pacific is projected to grow 14.7% annually till 2028,² a sign of the “consumerisation” of B2B payments as a new generation of business search for faster and more efficient payments just like how they pay and are paid in everyday life.
But this evolution is not happening fast enough. Processes are still riddled with inefficiencies, with fragmented systems, lack of interoperability, and legacy workflows making the digital shift stutter in the commercial landscape. The emergence of AI can change that. Agentic payments will change how consumers shop and pay, and the technologies enabling them can help evolve and transform B2B payments.
B2B payments today: Three steps forward, one step back
Imagine you are a CFO. You invested in a new enterprise payments solution to digitise B2B payments for your business, expecting your finance team to be happy. Unfortunately, the reverse happens – while some tasks are automated, your team finds themselves spending time to process invoices from vendors working on different formats, processes, and rules, while routine tasks like employee receipts trigger system discrepancies requiring manual troubleshooting from the team.
The result? Hours spent reconciling different spreadsheets, hunting for missing data, and resolving technical differences that cause new grumbles, drain resources, and slow down operations. While some time is saved, technical challenges also cause time to be wasted.
In short, current payment solutions automate tasks but fall short when automating for intent. They often lack contextual awareness to interpret desired outcomes and navigate different rules, which are critical in B2B payments.
Agentic payments: From automation to true autonomy
Agentic B2B systems, powered by autonomous AI agents, will enable a paradigm shift. Instead of rigid systems designed to perform tasks in a specific way, autonomous AI agents can be trained across a variety of systems to understand intent, orchestrate workflows, and deliver outcomes with speed, flexibility, and compliance.
Put yourself in the same CFO’s shoes again – this time, instead of spending precious time reconciling spreadsheets and resolving technical issues manually, AI agents can be directed to fetch invoices, find specific data, generate reports, and initiate action items for you and your teams to review.
The agents can also be trained to operate within secure, rule-based frameworks that uphold your company’s compliance policies and only act with appropriate human insight. An example is Visa Intelligent Commerce, a comprehensive suite of integrated APIs and a partner program, which lets you set clear payment preferences and controls, backed by authentication and tokenisation capabilities that prevent fraud, misuse, and agent errors. In addition, you can easily integrate Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol into your agentic B2B systems to only recognise trusted AI agents from suppliers and partners, enabling safe and interoperable B2B transactions on a global scale.
What matters is how Visa can bring agentic B2B payments to life with partners like Juspay, a global payment infrastructure provider. Supported by Visa-grade security capabilities and agentic protocols, our pilot partnership with Juspay empowers businesses to configure, onboard, and manage AI agents that automate B2B payment workflows – think fetching bills, triggering payments, filling forms, and generating real-time reports – all while ensuring seamless integration with virtual cards.
Most importantly, the human is at the heart of the process. Every automated action is governed by the rules and workflows set up by you and your teams, creating control, confidence, and most importantly, compliance with your company policies and market regulations. For B2B payments, it creates trust and efficiency on a global scale.
Some of the use cases that agentic B2B payments can enable include:
- “Fetch and pay all approved invoices for this week.” Rather than logging into multiple systems, downloading PDFs and manually initiating payments, finance teams can instruct agents to retrieve bills, validate against your approval rules, and pay instantly. This reduces processing from days to minutes while reducing the risk of errors.
- “Summarise our Q3 spend by category and vendor—just the highlights.” With natural language analytics, your team can ask questions naturally and receive instant insights. You can also validate the insights by asking agents to cite the sources or train them with the right sources in your request, both of which save precious time trawling through data.
- “Reconcile last month’s transactions and flag any discrepancies.” Spend less time combing through spreadsheets and account statements. Agents can analyse transaction data, identify mismatches, and resolve them autonomously, or escalate exceptions. This improves audit readiness and financial accuracy.
These are not fictional scenarios. They are already being demonstrated on agentic platforms built by Juspay in partnership with Visa. The shift from rigid workflows to intelligent and flexible delegation is set to help enterprises across Asia Pacific reclaim time, reduce risk, and refocus on strategic priorities.
At Visa, we believe in building the rails for intelligent commerce – an ecosystem where B2B agentic commerce is not just possible, but where agents are recognised and trusted members of the ecosystem, and agentic commerce is seamlessly integrated into enterprise operations. By combining our trusted global infrastructure with emerging agentic platforms, we are enabling secure, scalable and interoperable solutions that empower enterprises to focus on growth and not be slowed down by complex and manual processes.
It’s time to move beyond automation and into autonomy. The agents are ready. Are we?
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¹ UN Comtrade, ASEAN Stats, UNCTAD.